Can intonation contours be lexicalised? Implications for discourse meanings Sasha Calhoun and Antje Schweitzer Abstract We propose that words and short phrases in English can also be stored with intonation contours they frequently occur with, along with their discourse meanings We present a corpus study investigating intonational collocations, ie pairings of lexical phrases and accent contours, in a corpus of conversa- tional speech, Switchboard We developed a novel method to identify similar accent contours, using automatic pitch parameterisation (Möhler and Conkie, 1998) and clustering We found that intonational collocations are widespread, accounting for up to 34% of all tokens, and 76% of frequent lexical types in our data This shows prima facie evidence that word-contour pairs can be stored A qualitative analysis of frequent intonational collocations showed they are used with very specific discourse meanings, consistent with our claim that they are stored For each, lower frequency collocates with related discourse meanings could be identified, consistent with the exemplar-theoretic prediction that these discourse meanings can spread by analogy Finally, we present the results of a perception experiment showing that frequent words collocated with a particular accent type, and lower frequency words related to the frequent collocates, are judged to sound more natural than low frequency, unrelated collocates of that accent type This is consistent with the claim that frequency-based collocation is part of grammar, and affects language expectations (cf Bybee and Edding- ton, 2006) Keywords: intonational meaning, exemplar theory, collocations, corpus linguistics, lexicalisation 1. Introduction Consider the following exchange: (1) A: My daughter’s having six bridesmaids at her wedding, and 500 guests! B: Oh, really Brought to you by | De Gruyter / TCS Authenticated | 173.9.48.25 Download Date | 6/17/13 6:20 PM